


Slash and Burn

by bluntblade



Series: Tales from the Timeskip [8]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Battle, Custom Knights of Ren, Doosa People Gonna Die?, Female Knights of Ren, Gungans - Freeform, Kylo Ren is Not Nice, Not Canon Compliant - Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, POV Kylo Ren, Planet Naboo (Star Wars), Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, The Knights of Ren were Luke's Apprentices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:20:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22422496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluntblade/pseuds/bluntblade
Summary: Kylo Ren goes to Naboo to quell its defiance of the First Order, and cut a few more links to the past.
Relationships: Knights of Ren & Kylo Ren, Luke Skywalker & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: Tales from the Timeskip [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1719019
Comments: 4
Kudos: 3





	Slash and Burn

The boy Ben Solo had seen Naboo from space when he was young and naive enough to get caught up in its beauty.

When the Supreme Leader Kylo Ren beheld it again he rose from his command throne, glanced at General Pryde and gave the decree: “We take it.”

Political expediency had been behind his first visit. Back when the “Vader revelation” had become widespread and mushroomed into a scandal. His mother had always had an interest in Naboo - it had given much and bled heavily for the Old Republic and Rebellion - but now they had to “wrap themselves in the flag”, his father told him. 

To counter the image of his grandfather, they had to make a fuss about his grandmother. Senator, leader, idealist - and one of Darth Vader's first victims.

Somewhere in the back of Ben Solo’s mind, a suspicion arose that a pacifistic murder victim wasn't much of a match for the Emperor’s crushing right hand.

The visit had been a success, as much as a boy could judge. Of course, it being politics, it hadn't mattered to the boy so much as seeing the sights and the indignity of having his hair cut short. Apparently it was too messy for the occasion.

Naboo itself remained staunchly loyal to the New Republic. They had a huge, empty plinth in Theed, which the family had visited. _Shame’s Spectre_ , it was called; a reminder of where Emperor Palpatine had come from. The Naboo remembered well, and when the First Order diplomats came calling they were turned away with laser volleys.

So another errant child of Naboo came to settle the matter.

Water pooled in his boots, and mud dragged at them. The air was full of smoke and steam, the forest and fens ablaze around him. The Knights prowled around him, and his elite Stormtrooper divisions beyond them. Walkers waded through the mire, blasting and burning. 

The native amphibians were here in force. A surprising number of humans and other aliens too, but they did say the peoples of Naboo had worked to integrate following the Annexation. It mattered little enough to Ren. They came on, and they perished.

A Gungan cavalry trooper, the last of his irregular company, broke the white-armoured line and charged at Ren. Waiting for the last moment, he jerked aside and raised his saber into the path of the beast’s leg.

With a pained bellow, the creature toppled, pinning its rider beneath. The Knights ringed it and began carving at its flesh, while Ren dragged the Gungan up from the shallow water and crushed its neck in his fist. The Stormtroopers of his elite divisions, his prized killers, took it in their stride. On they marched.

He flexed his empty hand, feeling power crackle along his veins. Since Crait, since he called the Knights to his side again, he had felt his potency grow. Part of it was the caustic fire of the Ren. The rest was his growing mastery of the Force. There was no teacher now, but he had all the resources of the First Order to call upon, along with the hunger to use them.

Bark split and leaves ripped free with he struck out with his kinetic powers. Flying bodies hammered into trees and stone and went limp. The Knights descended upon the merely injured, the burning blades rising to plunge down. 

Then another rider, whom he dragged from the saddle and decapitated, brandishing the head as he waded into a formation of infantry with spears. The rest of that squadron went down in a storm of blaster fire.

The fizzing violet blades jabbed at him, but none marred his armour. He fended off blows and pummelled his attackers, the Knights keeping step and killing in their turn. A Gungan would lunge for him, only Gwaelyn’s halberd to slash across its throat or Torlun’s blaster to hurl it away, chest holed through by the shot. Or Kylo himself would catch the spear in his free hand, wrench it from the wielder’s hand and cut them clean in two, flinging the spear into another combatant’s chest almost as an afterthought. Nothing on this world challenged him.

He found a hut where the boy and his uncle had cooked for the family one evening.

His uncle had a surprising fondness for cooking. He reckoned one hour of preparing food equal to two spent meditating, if not better - though he avoided setting it to a timetable of any sort if he could help it. And he relished the act of giving inherent in cooking for others.

They’d talked about his grandmother as they went about it, the boy busying himself with a knife and vegetables as his uncle tended to the pans. He struggled to see what this strength was that his mother kept talking about. She had confronted Darth Vader, having failed to see the darkness in him, and only managed to get herself killed. Where was the strength in that?

His uncle had listened, turning fillets over in the pan with slow, measured movements, before answering. He thought the boy was confusing strength with power again. He understood that and no, if one looked at the life of Padme Amidala there weren't any great victories she had won all by herself.

But there were victories that had been won because she fought in them, and because her acts inspired others to do the same. More powerful people than she lacked strength - alas, her husband among them.

The boy had struggled with this. Because he had heard the story about how she'd died of a broken heart, leaving two children. What strength was that? Unless she had always relied on the power of others, and the moment that was gone, her wonderful strength left her.

His uncle had given him a long look, and then said the vegetables were diced small enough now. He picked out some pots of spice and began talking about Padme’s peacetime work.

That night was the first time the boy’s uncle looked at him with fear in his eyes. The boy didn't recognise it then. The night that he eventually did, he ceased to be a boy.

And just like the temple that night, the old hut burned.

As flame units set about the structure, he wondered idly about the girl, the one he now called the regicide in public. What would she make of that idealistic wisp of a woman? So different to his grandmother as he understood her, so full of power. Strength too. Maybe he'd ask her, when he found her. Before he rent her open with his saber and reclaimed the Skywalker blade from her corpse.

He knew she had failed to fix it. Enough reports had told and images showed her fighting with her old scavenger’s staff. Did she lack the means, he wondered, or did the weapon itself deny her?

It would be an appropriate undoing. He’d seen inside her head and she'd laid bare her weaknesses to him. However powerful she was, she was unmoored and struggling to chart her own course. Occasionally, in the depths of his dreams something of the old bond flickered to life, and her fear bled through.

That leant him strength. He was an inheritor of power, by blood and deed. He knew how to use it. She was a scavenger in every way, grasping for relics that were never meant for her. 

He could have shown her. She could have let him raise her up. Was it strength or weakness that prevented that?

An energy shield broke under his two-handed swing, bursting into light and vapour. He brought the saber around and impaled his enemy.

No matter. She was an obstacle now, another threat to his control. Her strength was her fragile little band of friends, so he would take them from her. Then he would break her, and the Jedi would be wiped from the Galaxy.

Then it would be the turn of the unreliable within his own ranks. A purification that would bring a new, perfect order into being. And then, at last, the Galaxy would know peace. He would know peace.

There was an old stone settlement ahead, not far from the hut. Occupied, a military outpost from its appearance, and the steady volleys of shot coming from it. Those strange plasma weapons the Gungans favoured, thrown out by catapult and incinerating entire squads of Stormtroopers where they struck.

Kylo and his Knights pressed on, throwing up walls of kinetic force against the onslaught and even hurling the projectiles back.

The fort was just another obstacle. Resilient for sure, but it could still torn down if one only applied enough firepower. He ordered his heavy weapons squads and walkers forward, and the moss-covered walls were stripped away second by second, the stone vaporised by a deluge of plasma. 

He broke into a charge before the bombardment even ended, the Knights following in his wake. Reaching out with his mind he found cracks, pried into them and tore the weakened walls open. 

They came into the midst of the Gungans like black thunderbolts, tearing over the broken stone with their weapons blazing red. Already disordered, the defenders’ formation collapsed. So heavy were Kylo’s blows that even if an opponent blocked them, they were knocked clean off their feet, easy prey for the hacking red blades.

“Tyrant!” The hoarse bellow came from behind him, and he lowered his saber just a little as he turned to regard his challenger. 

“Have we met?”

A burly old Gungan, his dark grey skin heavily scarred where it wasn’t covered in armour, came on with a vibro-sword and shield. “Meesa met a boy called Ben Solo once,” he rasped.

“And now you’ve condemned yourself to death, old creature.”

“Under First Order law. Naboo not First Order.”

Kylo gestured at the carnage around them. “I’d say it’s rather a formality at this stage.”

“Before yousa build eternal empire?” The old alien snorted. “Weesa seen yousa kind, tyrant.” There was something about the notion of dignity in a Gungan that he found perverse. As a race they seemed designed for clownishness, from appearance to their manner of speech. But there was something knowing about the old warrior which almost seemed to be a goad to him. “Palpatine make shame on all Naboo, but the good run in they who undid him. Yousa let the good in yousa undo the tyrant... or the good in others undo yousa.”

Kylo laughed then, a croak of sour amusement. “I’m not Palpatine. The First Order transcends the weaknesses of the Empire. We will not be undone so easily.”

“Weesa see.”

“You won’t.” 

The old Gungan was an experienced fighter, no doubt. But the Dark Side was not his to command. Kylo struck first, almost ripping the vibro-blade from his opponent’s grasp. He rode the momentum and took hold of his wrist with his free hand, driving his shoulder hard into the Gungan’s chest. A vicious backhand swing of the saber severed the shield-arm at the elbow and the Gungan staggered back.

Kylo swung his lightsaber as he stalked towards his wounded enemy. “Still so defiant?”

“To the last breath.”

“Very well.”

It was pitifully easy at the last - he caught the swing, drove the blade down and then whipped his own upwards, opening his enemy’s torso from hip to shoulder.

There were no further words, just a dying wheeze and the charred fish-stink of his enemy’s flesh.

Another link to the past cut away. But it wasn’t enough. He knew that. It would only be enough when he heard _her_ breath fade to silence, and the weak, confused boy died with her. All in due time, he told himself as the Knights surrounded him again.

They marched on.

**Author's Note:**

> My preferred route for Kylo Ren is very much that of the tragic villain, so apologies to any Reylos who made it this far. You do you, I just don't lean that way. Constructive criticism welcome.


End file.
